On Sun, 10 May 1998, Theo Markettos wrote:

> I've recently also put in a prototype podule that I've built
> which has some static RAM instead of the normal EPROM.  When the machine is
> first turned on, the RAM is scrambled, but RISC OS (usually) happily ignores
> it, as it would have to have the podule present and Acorn conformance bits in
> the correct pattern for it to be recognised.
> 
> On some occasions when BSD is booted, it enumerates the podules, roughly:
> 
> podulebus0:  Morley : SCSI : Morley SCSI Expansion with CDFS 2.21
> podulebus1:  Non-Acorn conformant expansion card
> 
> It then goes on to scan mosc0 and spot the MaxIT drive containing a RiscBSD
> formatted disc which is my main BSD disc.  Once it's finished scanning the
> SCSI chain, it then appears to hang (Ctrl-Esc doesn't work).  If it is booted
> without the second podule present, it carries on as normal.
> 
> How does RiscBSD handle non-conformant podules?  Surely it should just ignore
> them and carry on?  Does it handle them at all?
> 
> Apologies if this has already been fixed...
Hmm, non-conformant podules have not really been tested well in the
podulebus probing due to the lack of such beasts ;-)

Any podule that does not identify itself as conformant will receive that
message (bit 7 of byte 0 of the header should be 0.
Since it is non-conformant no other podule information will be extracted.

Looking at the code such podules will still be offered to podule bus
devices probe functions.
At a guess I would suspect that the ether3 podule driver is probably
attempting to do something with this podule as it has a slight hack so
that it will attach itself to ROM-less podules. (There was a time when
there were a lot of ether3's without ROMS when the SA110 was launched due
to a bug in the loader that stopped it working unless you upgraded the
ROM (which you had to pay for)).

I would suggest trying the following option in the extra options field of
the boot loader

podule?.disable

where ? is the slot number of you prototype podule.

I'll see what I can do to fix this.

Cheers,
				Mark